Bertha Cool said, “Don’t go near Santa Carlotta. Don’t have anything—”
“Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “That Santa Carlotta business is out anyhow. We’d show her up for an impostor within five minutes after she made the claim. What we want right now is to clean up this murder.”
“What do you want out of me?” she asked.
“I want the facts on the Harris murder,” I said. “I want everything you know.”
She started to laugh then, and I could see hard defiance in her eyes. “Well, go jump in the lake,” she said. “You’ve run a damn good bluff, and it’s got you nowhere. You win on one thing. I’m not going to stick my neck out in Santa Carlotta. John Harbet will just have to get along without me. As far as the rest of it is concerned, you’re barking up the wrong tree, and if you don’t think I know what I m doing, just stick around and I’ll call the cops.”
“A fat chance of you calling the cops,” I said.
She said, “That shows all you know about it. If you’d waited until this afternoon when I’d driven to Santa Carlotta and given my statement to the Courier, told them I had come for a settlement with Dr. Alftmont, and then disappeared, you’d have had something you could pin on me, and—”
“You were going to disappear?” I asked.
Her laugh was a sneer. She said, “Of course I was. For a smart Lick, you’re awfully dumb about some things. I couldn’t let Alftmont lamp me. He’d know I wasn’t Amelia as soon as he saw me. I was going to tell my story to a newspaper reporter. I was going to say that I had an appointment with Dr. Alftmont. Then I was going to disappear. It was going to look as though I’d been bumped off, and the evidence was going to point to Alftmont. About the time he was denying that, we were going to connect him up with Evaline Harris, and the police down here were going to accuse him of the Harris murder. The witness would identify him, and that would have been all there was to it. Public opinion would have been divided over whether he’d killed me or not, but when they added the Harris business on top of it, he wouldn’t have stood a chance.
“Now then, that’s all there is to it. Alftmont murdered Evaline. I hope they hang a first degree on him for that. He tried to get some information out of her, and she wouldn’t kick through. The party got rough. Don’t kid yourself about Dr. Charles Loring Alftmont. He’s a killer. I’m no tin angel myself, but I can’t stomach murder. If you’d waited until this afternoon, you could have pinched me for something. As it is, I’m in the clear. You can’t do a damn thing. If you don’t get out of here, I’ll call the cops.”